There is a thought people like to comfort themselves with.
The unstoppable force meets the immovable object, and existence holds its breath to see which one gives, and the question is supposed to be grand and unanswerable and a little bit beautiful.
It is a nice thought.
It belongs to beings who have only ever met forces and objects.
Because somewhere above the unstoppable and the immovable both, older than the framing of the question, there are things that do not care for the contest at all.
Things that were ancient when the first force learned to push and the first object learned to hold. Things that look at the grand unanswerable question the way an adult looks at two children arguing over which of them is stronger, and that reach down, without much interest, and pick the argument up, and end it, because the argument was never theirs and the children were never anything but small.
The decrepit hand was one of those things.
And so it met almost no resistance.
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